Editorial | Panel must dig into abuse cases

A "policy failure,'' is how Kentucky's top child protection official this week described the state's role in the 2011 abuse death of a three-year-old Western Kentucky girl. "Egregious."

"I have agonized over the failure," Teresa James, state commissioner of social services, told an outside group of professionals formed to review child abuse deaths and injuries in Kentucky.

It is heartening to see Commissioner James take responsibility and acknowledge personal anguish.

But events leading up to the 2011 death of Alayna Adair from head injuries - three weeks after her fractured elbow was reported to the Cabinet for Health and Family Services as suspected abuse- are far worse than a policy failure.

They are criminal, according to a Christian County grand jury which indicted the former state social worker assigned to investigate Alayna's case. The child's father has been charged with murder.

And the state's role is so disturbing that the recently organized Child Fatality and Near Fatality Review Panel would do well to dig deeper in this case - and any others like it - to find out how things could go so wrong. Panel members should demand answers about what the cabinet knew, when it knew it and what it has done to avoid a repeat performance.

One point of inquiry should be how a social worker could so easily allegedly falsify records, fabricate accounts of visits to a family's home and apparently make up details of the investigation, such as that the child victim appeared "clumsy."

In Alayna's case, state records say Donna Currey, the former social worker charged with falsifying state records, dismissed as "bogus" the original report of suspected abuse from a hospital report that stated in part:

"Child came in yesterday with a swollen and bruised left elbow, vomiting and fever and mosquito bites. Child was so sick that she did not cry or whimper or reach out (for father) when they were doing procedures on child. Child also has small bruises in spots all over her body."

Ms. Currey lied about visiting the child and her father to check out that report as well as acting on the insistence of a doctor that Alayna's broken elbow "was not a normal facture for a child that age," according to state records.

In fact, it is unclear whether Ms. Currey ever saw the child before she died July 3 even though state policy required her to see the child within one hour of the first abuse report and even though the state got a second report from the hospital where Alayna was treated for the broken elbow, urging state officials to follow up.

State officials have concluded the social worker falsified her account of a meeting with the child and father in which she described Alayna as "clumsy" and the father as "caring, loving and appropriate."

Ms. Currey, who has pleaded not guilty, also was involved in the case of nine-year-old Amy Dye - the Western Kentucky girl fatally bludgeoned in her adoptive home in 2011. She has not been accused by state officials of any wrongdoing in that case.

Officials at Amy's Todd County school have told lawmakers that the state appeared to disregard their reports of Amy's suspected abuse at home. Records a judge ordered released in the case include a letter from the South Todd Elementary school nurse listing six separate reports of suspected abuse - each to Currey. No abuse was substantiated before Amy's violent death.

Ms. Currey's indictment in Alayna's case isn't an isolated circumstance. In 2011, an Anderson County grand jury indicted former state social worker Margaret "Geri" Murphy on nine counts of falsifying records - some of which involved sexual abuse of young children - and all of which she closed as unfounded.

Ms. Murphy last year pleaded guilty to falsifying results of investigations - a pattern that continued over four years despite repeated complaints of families, police and co-workers.

The child fatality panel is in a unique position to fully investigate. We urge them to do so.

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Editorial | Panel must dig into abuse cases

A 'policy failure' is how Kentucky's top child protection official this week described the state's role in the 2011 abuse death of a three-year-old Western Kentucky girl.